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I’ve been told by a contact at EA that a lot of projects get launched more as research efforts than actual attempts to produce a title for release. This has included more than a few experiments involving Origin IPs, including Ultima and Wing Commander.

# Samurai Empire expansion. I did most of the coding for getting in the new wearables. I also did the a lot of the scripting side of the new Bushido and Ninjitsu skills. I did a proof-of-concept for the roof tile system which was later turned over to an intern. I also did a proof-of-concept for a Unreal Tournament-style PvP battlefield system that was rejected (and continues to be a bit of sore spot with the point of view of management).

# Unannounced game revamp. This isn't a 'great memory' so I don't know why I'm mentioning it. Yes, we were working on UO2 for the third time. We had a 3D client and were doing awesome things with breaking the skills into specialization and quest-based learning. The server technology was mostly staying the same, but we had finer-granularity movement actually working that allowed you to move within a tile. The scope of the project grew huge and we didn't have time to finish it nor wherewithal to cut part of it. Everything was scrapped and the idea eventually became Kingdom Reborn.

# Mondain's Legacy expansion. Mostly support work here. I supported the rest of the engineering team and picked up a lot of the "smaller" tasks like the world collections (museum, zoo, etc) and parrots. I also worked on an asset replacement system that was supposed to help our artists be able to test out new content in the game engine faster. I also helped MrTact and EvilMantis design the guts of the Quest system. I left EA before this expansion went live.

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The UO2.3 started at Origin and was originally using a custom engine, then we evaluated several different EA engines and eventually went with the Sims 2 Engine (which is actually Maxis' engine, called the Gonzo-Rizzo Framework [yeah, no idea]). It was big and bloated and I hated working on it.

We were toying around with being able to play several of your characters at the same time (on one account) and actually had a concept video made up for it. In the end we were going to call it "Kingdoms" (probably the 'Kingdom' in the Kingdom Reborn name) and it was going to have an RTS element where your house was actually a much larger estate and you had workers, fighters, etc.

In the end, Design went overboard, Production didn't hold the reigns very tightly, we had no budget to redo all of the Art as 3D models and Code had two different methodologies between the Origin folks and the EA folks that joined us. Friction abounded.

The cancellation of it certainly was a factor, but there were many things to consider: The Origin team didn't see eye-to-eye with our then -producer and people's housing subsidies from the TX->CA move started running out. NoCal is expensive

Personally, I think EA figured that we'd all leave when our 1- or 2- year contracts ran out. They were pretty much right. In fact, some theories say that they intended to drive us away.

Anyways, it is as it is.

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Yeah, UO 2.3 originally started back in Austin, and actually I think the very first ever mention of it was a hint in Introducing STLdude back in July '03. After the move to EA, it started to get much more serious and we picked up team members from the UX:O team that needed stuff to do. The bulk of the team (which included new team members from EA) were working on UO2.3 while the rest of us did UO:SE.

You don't really find any mentions of the project by the dev team on the web, but I know that there were several hints dropped and coy answers given whenever people talked face-to-face.

Fortunately, nothing was ever officially announced. In the game biz, projects like this typically (and often) start up and die without anyone on the outside ever knowing. It's harder to maintain the illusion on a live game especially with a vocal team.

I'm sad that UO2.3 didn't come to fruition, but I'm not convinced that EA could've done it right.

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That video in the OP maybe the one he mentioned that was made up to show people controlling several of their characters at once.

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